Lynch law n. The act or practice by private persons of inflicting punishment for crimes or offenses, without due process of law. Note: The term Lynch law is said to be derived from a Virginian named Lynch, who took the law into his own hands. But the origin of the term is very doubtful.

... mob. The great riot gave those young men their first summons to enter the service of freedom. It was not long afterward probably that they both began to read the Liberator. From that event many intelligent and conservative people associated slavery with lynch law and outrage upon the rights of free ...— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... because he paid his rent on getting a reduction of thirty per cent., he was taken out and shot in the thigh. His wife, who was only three days after her confinement, pleaded for mercy on this account, but these lynch law authorities were deaf to the appeal for mercy, and she did not recover the shock of the entry of these 'moonlight' Thugs. This man could have identified his assailants, but he ...— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey

... be mentioned The Napoleon of Peace (Louis Philippe), and The Land of Liberty, "recommended to the consideration of Brother Jonathan." In the latter, allusion is made to the Mexican war, rifle duelling and rowdyism, repudiation, Lynch law, and the then but no longer "peculiar institution." These will be found in the thirteenth volume, with a design of great excellence, Punch's Vision at Stratford-on-Avon, supposed to occur ...— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... stout lamp-iron at the corner of a street in Paris, used by the mob for extemporised executions during the Revolution by Lynch law. ...— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... people of Manaos became excited. A mob of Indians and negroes hurried, in their blind folly, to surround the prison and roar forth tumultuous shouts of death. In this part of the two Americas, where executions under Lynch law are of frequent occurrence, the mob soon surrenders itself to its cruel instincts, and it was feared that on this occasion it would do ...— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne

... of the right of the individual to punish, by the infliction of death, the person who has injured him, puts the community at the mercy of the worst elements in it. It is the extension of the barbarism of lynch law. It makes every man, who wants to be one, a mob. It develops the idea of savagery in revenge to such an extent that the individual executioner of the offender against himself does not hesitate to wreak his vengeance from behind. ...— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... ministers and magistrates, and killing without scruple those who interfered with them. The good men in such a case banded themselves together as regulators and put down the wicked with ruthless severity, by the exercise of lynch law, shooting ...— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

... Walt, neither did I," he admitted. "Lynch law is a horrible thing; don't make any mistake about that. But there's one thing more horrible, and that's no law at all. And that is the present situation ...— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper

... faults are on the surface. I am not one to justify Lynch law, whatever may be the necessities which exist in the Far West. Riots in the United States are cited which have performed their work of fire and devastation, and which no one has dared treat rigorously ...— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... "No. They wanted to appoint some one,—a renegade lawyer from the States, Bill Brown,—but I declined him. He's taken the other side, now. It's lynch law, you know, and their minds are made up. They're ...— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... blushed for himself and for his uncle, that such a state of things had been allowed to go on; he wondered that it could have gone on; that he had been blind to so much of it, or that the men had not exercised Lynch law upon Roy. ...— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... of devils cheered like madmen. I was so aroused that I felt that ecclesiastical lynch law should be applied to any minister whose utterances caused such jubilee among ...— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris